PETALING JAYA, July 22 ― Former police chief Tan Sri Rahim Noor’s claim that police are now helpless to stomp out the alleged rise of gangs serves only as “damning testimony” of the force’s slide into “deplorable standards”, a DAP lawmaker said today.
Yesterday, the former Inspector-General of Police said the new law proposed to replace the Emergency Ordinance (EO) must permit “preventive detention”, claiming it was needed to allow the police to tackle gangsterism that they “admit” is on the rise and “out of control”.
“It’s like they have broken wings. Things are no longer like they were before. Intelligence gathered can only be documented,” he said in an interview published by Mingguan Malaysia, the weekend edition of Malay-language daily Utusan Malaysia.
But DAP MP Tony Pua (picture) noted the discrepancy between Rahim’s claims that police were amassing evidence of such activity but could not act on the information gathered.
“That, however, can only mean that either the ‘intelligence’ isn’t very intelligent, or there isn’t anyone intelligent to exercise the ‘intelligence’ to fight crime,” the PJ Utara MP said in a statement.
The DAP lawmaker has previously criticised the attempts to resurrect the law introduced in 1969 to deal with the May 13 riots and which gave the police broad powers to detain individuals indefinitely without trial, saying an over-reliance on the preventive detention had eroded the force’s investigative prowess.
The EO was repealed in 2011, together with the lifting of three Emergency declarations that provided the basis for its existence, but since then, the Home Ministry and police have clamoured for the return of the preventive detention powers it once afforded them.
But the call led opposition Pakatan Rakyat lawmakers to accuse the Najib administration of backtracking on its pledges of reform, while Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail has flatly refused to re-introduce laws that would provide for preventive detention powers.
“We ask that the government adopt the A-G’s position in this matter, that ‘the existing laws are sufficient to tackle criminals’, and that ‘it is better to let more guilty people go free than to send the innocent to jail’,” Pua said.
The authorities said the law had been reserved for “hardened criminals” and organised crime, but critics claim it had since been abused and used against everyday snatch thieves and, most controversially, on opposition leaders like the six Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) members who were arrested en route to Bersih’s 2011 rally for allegedly waging a war against the Yang di-Pertuan Agong.
When explaining the rationale for abolishing the EO last year, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the banishment powers it had offered was rendered obsolete by technology and that police must adapt to the new reality.
Pua also pointed to Rahim’s role in the assault of then Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim during the latter’s arrest by the police in 1998, saying the assault and subsequent denial cast doubt on the police force’s ability to be fair arbiters when given preventive detention powers.
“Instead of taking his advice on the EO, Tan Sri Rahim Noor’s action instead exemplifies the need to repeal the EO as the police, and even the IGP, lack the competence and cannot be trusted to decide who is or is not guilty before a person is charged in court,” Pua added.
